Bone Dance (34 page)

The first time David had seen the wood, Jimmy had been cradling it in his rough stableboy's hands, sanding the fine grain of its maple shaft. David had just returned to the boarding house from Dr. Petley's surgery, where he'd been assisting until he had sufficient funds to establish his own practice. His brother was still stubbornly refusing to underwrite what he regarded as David's folly in abandoning civilized Montreal for a dusty, treeless timber town. But David had found Ottawa a lively, if fractious, city with a shortage of doctors to attend to the new Dominion's burgeoning public service. He would prove Liam wrong yet, and for the first time use his own resources to establish himself.

His first move had been to purchase a horse and carriage so that he possessed the means to respond to calls from across the city. Widow Barnaby's boarding house had a generous stable at the rear, and David had first encountered Jimmy when he'd brought his new horse home. She was a small, wiry bay, sway-backed and no longer young, but beautiful nonetheless for being his very own. He scrutinized Jimmy's every move as the boy watered her and rubbed her down, singing a lilting Celtic ballad as he worked.

“My mother used to sing Irish songs when I was a boy,” David observed. “But I haven't heard that one.”

“Made it up meself,” Jimmy mumbled, picking up a currying brush. Despite the boy's broad hands and ungainly limbs, something about his touch seemed tender.

“You use words well. Can you read?”

Jimmy reddened beneath his freckles. “Some. Not much call to.”

“Jimmy!” a man bellowed from the adjacent room. “What're you yammering about out there! Get on with—” The head groom thrust his balding head through the door and snapped to attention at the sight of David. Deference erased the sneer of contempt from his face. “Dr. Browne! Jimmy ought to be fetching your carriage out the front entrance, sir.”

“Thank you, Mr. Regan. In future he will, but today I wanted to oversee her care myself.”

Hands clasped behind him, Mr. Regan inspected the horse with military solemnity. “If you have any concerns or complaints, doctor, please inform me immediately.” He gave Jimmy a meaningful stare before taking his leave.

Jimmy bowed his tousled head as he resumed his chores, but the joy was gone from his step and the song from his lips. The following afternoon David stopped by the bookstore on a whim, and as Jimmy loosened Lady's traces, David laid his purchase down on the boy's favourite straw bale.

“This just came into the bookshop, and I thought you might enjoy it. It's the adventures of a young lad named Tom Sawyer.”

Jimmy averted his gaze shyly without response, but the next morning the book had disappeared. When it reappeared on the straw bale a week later, David replaced it with
Gulliver's Travels
and then with a tale by the popular British author Charles Dickens. Over the spring, this informal tutelage slowly grew, away from the critical eye of the head groom. One morning when David arrived to fetch his trap, he found a notebook sitting on the bale. Jimmy was bent over a maple log, painstakingly whittling. David picked up the notebook,
which was filled with a sprawling, clumsy hand. Jimmy focussed even more intently on his whittling.

“May I borrow this?” David asked. “The nights are long, and the company of my fellow boarders is sometimes wanting.”

David interpreted Jimmy's buck tooth grin as acquiescence, and no more was said. When David settled into bed with the notebook, he found his intuition confirmed. The writing was ragged and the language rough, but the long rambling ballad itself was fascinating. Adventures on the high seas, discoveries of distant lands; a journey into a young man's dreams as he gazed out through the bars of the life to which he was born.

The ballad would not leave him. The next day David went to view a modest house on Daly Street. Houses in Sandy Hill were being bought by Ottawa's new professional families as quickly as tradesmen could erect them, and with its proximity to the hospital on Rideau Street, it seemed the perfect neighbourhood for a young physician to establish himself. The red brick house had room on the main floor for both a consulting room and a modest surgery, as well as ample quarters for himself upstairs. A third floor held sufficient space for domestic staff once he was able to afford them.

That latter qualification troubled him all the way back to the boarding house until he spied Jimmy hard at work at his carving. From the chunk of maple, the curved frame of a harp had emerged. A brilliant idea set David's hopes soaring.

“Jimmy.” He tried to make his words sound casual. “I will be moving to my own house soon, and I will need someone to care for Lady, and perhaps to tend to some of the domestic affairs whilst I'm in surgery.”

Jimmy barely paused, but his fingers fumbled over Lady's bridle.

“On the third floor, there's a room with space for a bed,
desk and gas lamp by which to write. I can't pay you much yet, but I can offer you room and board in exchange for your services. On one condition.”

“Me ma needs me at home,” Jimmy interjected, but David paid scant attention, for he had attended at Jimmy's mother's last confinement himself, and he knew there wasn't a square inch to spare in their cottage.

“On one condition,” he repeated. “There's a small school two blocks from my home. I've spoken to the headmaster, and you may begin classes in September. There you will read not only Mark Twain and Charles Dickens, but Shakespeare, Thomas More, and all the great writers of history.”

Jimmy flushed a mottled red, and David caught a momentary glint of moisture in his eyes. Briskly, David reached into his black bag. “There's no hurry to decide. Meanwhile try this cat gut on the harp; it should produce a better sound than horsehair on the lower strings.”

Jimmy didn't meet his gaze nor reach for the suture thread, which David laid on his straw bale, while Jimmy busied himself rubbing down the tack. To save the boy further embarrassment, David retrieved his black bag and headed for the house.

“It's a long way,” Jimmy murmured, almost out of earshot. “From me kin and me mates. I wouldn't know a soul.”

David paused to reconsider the wisdom of his idea. Jimmy was a mere boy, fourteen at the most, rough-hewn and lacking the easy confidence that comes from breeding. David knew better than most how it felt to walk into a classroom of fashionably dressed and impeccably bred young men, not daring to speak lest his peasant grammar make him the laughingstock. In his shame, he'd even invented a father who had been a brave ship's captain lost at sea rather than own up to the drunken, penniless candlestick maker who'd blighted his youth.

By what perverse missionary zeal did he presume to drag this shy, reluctant boy along this same path? He retraced his steps to the stable, where he surprised the boy bent over his harp with the new cat gut. Jimmy thrust it aside and returned to cleaning the bridle.

“Jimmy, I know I'm Protestant, but I was a boy like yourself once, living in a shanty and apprenticed to a bootmaker. But I had a dream, and in this new country our fathers chose, we are all entitled to dreams. The Lord has given you a great talent and the means to fulfil whatever dream you will. But it must be your dream, not mine.”

“Me Da's already worked hard to get me this position here. He won't accept charity.”

David intended to arrange payment of Jimmy's tuition, so that he would not experience the derision heaped on the charity cases. “I'd expect you to work hard. I need a man I can rely on. Why don't I call on your father after church on Sunday, and discuss the arrangement with him?”

The boy's eyes widened. “He's a bit old-fashioned, is me da. Just so you know, he don't like words the way I do.”

David had occasion to recall Jimmy's warning during his encounter with the boy's father that Sunday afternoon, for more apt words were never spoken. In the sweltering noonday heat of June, he had been ushered to the only easy chair in the front room to face the man's stubborn, hard-bitten stare. A massive wooden crucifix dominated the tiny room, a palpable symbol of the divide between them.

“ 'Preciate the offer, Doctor,” Mr. Donahue said. “But I got Jimmy a good position at Widow Barnaby's, with tolerable pay
and a chance for advancement. What would he be learning from books at school?”

“He's bright, Mr. Donahue, and he's good with words.”

“Oh, aye? Lot of good that is to the likes of us. I's a mill worker, and I'll not say I's ashamed of it, but I wants better for me sons. Jimmy's good with his hands, and he's got a way with animals. Widow Barnaby is right pleased with him.”

“The head groom doesn't seem as enthusiastic.”

Mr. Donahue was unperturbed. “Mr. Regan wants the job for his own brother's boy. A no-good layabout never done an honest day's work in his life.”

“Nonetheless, it's not the happiest arrangement for the boy. I'm offering him a chance to tend my horse and go to school at the same time. Perhaps later to college so he can procure a position with the government.”

Mr. Donahue said nothing, but his clamped jaw betrayed his contempt for that idea. David searched for a currency the man might value.

“I'll pay him, naturally. The same wage he earns at the stable, minus a modest room and board. Let him try it for the school term, after which, if he prefers, I'll ensure he's reinstated at Widow Barnaby's.”

The father folded his thin, sinewy arms across his chest as if to bolster his defiance. “But he'll be no better than a servant boy, doing whatever chores you've a mind to ask him.”

“I could teach him a great deal that could prove useful to him in later life, to help prepare him for . . .” Seeing a scowl of protest forming on Mr. Donahue's brow, David let his voice trail off. Assistance arrived from an unexpected direction.

“It would have to be a Catholic school,” a sharp voice interrupted, and David turned to see an extremely stout woman filling the doorway to the back room. She was perspiring
profusely as she mopped a stained dishrag over her brow.

Her husband glowered. “He's not going to no school.”

“But he'd still get his wage, Jem, and we could use the room here. And you know how he is, writing his poems. Not much for man's work anyhow.”

“My point. School's no place to toughen him up.”

David debated the wisdom of intruding on the domestic discord and costing the father further loss of face. He sensed, however, that the mother was the force to be reckoned with in the family.

“It would be a Catholic school,” he assured her.

“Not them Christian Brothers!” Effecting a strategic retreat, the father found another position to defend. “I don't want no French.”

“It's an Irish school a mere two blocks from my new home in Sandy Hill.”

“That's a long way off,” the father countered. “When would he ever get time to come see his ma?”

“Every Sunday, so he can go to church and have Sunday dinner with the family.”

Outmanoeuvred, the father cast about for a fresh avenue of protest, and into the breach leaped Mrs. Donahue, who bustled forward with surprising speed to usher David to the door. “Thank you for your interest, Dr. Browne. We'll think on it, and you'll have our answer within the week.”

The first rumblings of trouble came on Dominion Day two days later. Half a dozen youthful revellers imbued with more spirits than common sense took to the streets from Darcy's Tavern in the wee hours of the morning, singing Irish freedom
songs and setting the Union Jack ablaze outside the Bank of British North America. The following evening, when David returned from his hospital rounds, he found Jimmy seated on his customary straw bale, but his harp lay forgotten at his side, and he was immersed in a newspaper. When he glanced up, David beheld a resolute sorrow in the boy's gaze that quite took his youth away.

Jimmy shoved the newspaper behind the bale and jumped up to take David's horse. David leaned over to retrieve the paper, which he observed with distaste to be
The Sentinel
, the latest publication of the Loyal Orange Order. Based on the Dominion Day skirmish and a similar one in Toronto, the editor was making dire predictions about the resurgence of Fenianism and exhorting all loyal Canadians to march in the Orange Parade on July 12th in defence of the empire.